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CRM: The Breed of Customers

CRM: The Breed of Customers

CRM - Whiteboard Wednesday

Hi, I’m James. Welcome to this Whiteboard Wednesday, and I would just like to take a moment to say: Have you been working out? Customer relationship management. Now, this is a software or even a Web-based tool that a lot of companies use. We here at Fishbowl use it.

We don’t really want to get into specifics with this particular Whiteboard. We want to talk about the customers. The customers that we have to deal with, that you have to deal with, and maybe kind of how to work with them – just a little bit.

So, you’ve got here, along your potential incoming customers, you’ve got your new-new, which is someone coming in with no information about your product or services. But they’re easy to teach new tricks to. They pick it up quickly; they want to know.

Then you have the scared. They might have some idea of who you are, or the people within your industry; but, they might be overwhelmed with all the information, and they need some confirmations as to what you can do and what you can provide.

You have the confused where they’re almost chasing their own tail because they don’t even know what to do. Maybe there’s too much going on within their own company, and you just need to start at one with where they can benefit from your goods or services.

Then let’s move down here where we’ve got, hopefully, a range of our own current customers. We often are so busy getting the new customers, that we forget about the ones we have and repeat business in keeping them happy.

So let’s start with that. The happy customers; they are part of your pack, they’re glad with everything that has been provided for them, and they need that consistency.

Then you have (sometimes) the sad. Maybe what you provided was not quite what they expected. Maybe they’ve done something on their end that has broken something or messed something up, and you need to be able to go in and show them what to do.

And then, of course, we have the angry. These are the guys and gals that have maybe been mistreated, forgotten, something didn’t work out, the product broke. We all have to deal with it. We’ve had our fair share of a few angry customers, and the best thing you can do is try to approach them logistically, reasonably as to how you can help alleviate their problem as fast as possible. But there are still those times when maybe they’re just in the wrong pack and you’ve got to put them down… metaphorically speaking. Maybe that’s an analogy, who knows? Sometimes they’re just not a good fit and you need to be able to say, “Sorry we couldn’t help you,” and you get going about your business. You will not make everyone happy.

Now, why do we talk about all of these “breeds” of customers? Well, if you take all these into account, and you’re trying to keep track of the different companies you work with, the different customers that you have to interact with, what are you using to monitor all that?

That’s the whole point of a CRM, is it should be able to integrate with your company, with your business, and even on the level of your employees; whether they’re account managers, sales managers, or other possible employees, depending on your business. The whole point being that you know at every point of interaction what’s happened with your customer, what’s happened on your sales end; as far as the latest interaction or what they’re going to do with the next, maybe, email blast, maybe an update for that customer, so you have a very current list and history of what has happened. So you’re not doing guesswork. Because if every time you’re trying to figure out with a customer which category they fall under, they’re pretty quickly going to fall under this one.

That’s the whole point of a CRM. We’ll get into the actual work flow of a CRM in another video, but today we’re just going to cover the customers that you have, and hopefully you’re able to figure out for yourself; how to monitor all these, how to keep records, how to keep track. Just like we talk about all the time – good data leads to good business decisions.

That’s this Whiteboard Wednesday. Thanks. See you again soon. That was cheesy.